In the Windows version of Office, the bundled applications all work with SharePoint. You can check documents out, check documents in, and work with versions, all from within the individual Office application. So Word on Windows just works with SharePoint, as does Excel. You can even mount SharePoint folders via WebDAV. For groups working on the same document(s), SharePoint is a useful tool -- at least, for Office on Windows.

On the Mac, Office has as much built-in SharePoint integration as iWork '08 or TextEdit: None, outside of being able to work with Office files. To do anything with SharePoint on a Mac, you have to use a Web browser, and you lose a lot of functionality. You have to check out a document, download it to your machine, work on it, then upload and check the document back in. At that point, iWork '08 has equivalent SharePoint integration as any version of Office on the Mac. Due to the way the Mac OS works with WebDAV, you can't even mount SharePoint folders in the Finder, because dot-files evidently do bad things to SharePoint.

So, if you work for a company that relies on SharePoint--and a lot do--there's no version of Office for the Mac that's easy to use for work items. IRM only increases the pain.

While IRM is similar in functionality to digital-rights management, when you're talking about the business arena, such technology actually makes sense. IRM allows you, outside of file permissions and ACLs, to create access and usage permissions that live in the file itself. So even if someone is able to gain access to a file, you can still restrict what they can do with it. Some items you can limit are:

Who can view a document
Editing
Saving
Copy/Paste
Exporting as a different file format
Printing
Macros
Forward an e-mail message
Reply to an e-mail message
Document/e-mail expiration

In a larger company, or one that deals with sensitive information that must have controlled access internally, IRM is a fairly transparent, user-friendly way to manage access to documents. If you use Office on a Mac, you're pretty much locked out of IRM, which means you either use Office for Windows via some method, or you don't use a Mac.

It's not just the lack of VBA that is causing problems for Office users on the Mac, it's a whole host of things. Even allowing for the return of VBA support, Office on the Mac has some real problems transparently interacting with the rest of the Microsoft Office world. If VBA is the only business-friendly feature that the next version of Office has, then I think Mac version runs a high probability of gradually disappearing from the business world, even as the Mac increases its presence there.

John C. Welch is a senior systems administrator for The Zimmerman Agency, and a long-time Mac IT pundit.